Jane's Fame

"This is a completely different experiment. It’s a two-fold book. A chunk of it is a flashback to Jane Austen’s actual life, but the bulk of the book is about her afterlife, the making of her reputation. In 21st century, post big-tome, biography it has become more common for biographers to be interested in the myths that surround a life. That’s now vital to the genre. Jane Austen died in her forties – she had published, but not under her own name – and her family immediately presented a certain wariness of her genius. They offered an image of a properly modest lady who gave no evidence that she was writing, did all her womanly duties and was “a dabbler”. They kept her behind this screen. But when her fame grew, her family reconstructed this image and she became “divine Jane” on a pedestal. Her family holds onto her papers, manipulates her image and even doctors her physical looks in pictures so she looks more prettified and feminine. The kernel for Harman – and I find her very persuasive – is that Austen was a witty girl, hungry for attention, not so self-effacing, quite waspish in her later years, full of spirit and life. A far cry from the image of impeccability that the family fostered. One phrase which I liked particularly is Jane Austen’s humorous boast in a letter, “I write only for fame.” So Harman has a spirited image of Austen that combats the family myth, and enables her to write wittily about all the different aspects of the idealisation of Jane Austen. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I’ll give you an example of her wit. Claire Harman describes how Hollywood – armed in 1940 with Laurence Olivier’s Mr Darcy – changed the period of Pride and Prejudice to 40 years later than it should be, so that the costumes could be more elaborate. The costumes were devised by someone who had been involved with costumes for Gone With the Wind . According to Harman, this designer felt that “the fashions of 1815 didn’t afford her enough scope. The resulting dresses were fantastically extravagant. The Bennet women hardly fit in the milliner’s shop, in the opening scene they are wearing such huge hats and crinolines. And when Darcy and Elizabeth sit together on a bench, it’s not pride nor prejudice which seems to keep them apart so much as their clothes.” I think it does. It is fashionable at the moment to publish fictional treatments of real lives. I find some of them unconvincing. I would rather read something closer to the truth, because fiction allows itself so much licence with facts. Might it be legitimate for a novelist treating Henry James’s life to suggest that James killed his sister? I’d say no. On the other hand there are the great imaginative treatments of lives, like Shakespeare’s Richard III . In this case the drama is so convincing that it has shaped the image of Richard III as a murderer ever since. There are abundant precedents of fictional or dramatic treatment of historical or literary figures that persuade one of the authenticity of the view. It’s an interesting question. My own attempts at biography have been, like Claire Harman’s, to resist the myth – to go back to the archives and see which myths don’t hold. But I’ve found that it’s really hard to budge the legend. I’ll give you an instance. In 2007 it was the 150th anniversary of Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë . The Brontë Parsonage invited four biographers to talk about Mrs Gaskell’s view of Charlotte Brontë . All four of us all said we beg to differ, because we know now that the Brontës were much more embedded in society than Mrs Gaskell’s romanticised view of roamers of the moors. Not that they didn’t roam the moors, but that idea needs counterbalancing. The audience listened to us courteously, but then someone burst out at the end, “But I like the romantic story!”"